Nigeria is a country consistently tilting towards one violent situation or another. Since its independence in 1960, Nigeria has witnessed numerous ethnoreligious conflicts that have threatened its ...corporate existence. For example, age-long feelings of relative deprivation by certain sections of the country, have given rise to the continuous reference to a need to address the national question: a phenomenon that describes the aggregation of concerns by the different nationalities on how they can or should cohabit in the same federation. However, elections, and the entire electoral process, often serve as precipitates of ethnoreligious conflicts in Nigeria. Aside from the tensions that always sprout about who becomes what, there is a more prominent challenge of where the candidate comes from. Thus, elections in Nigeria often get reduced to geographical linings of candidates, rather than their competence or political ideology. This is often festered by the need to provide opportunities for all geographical sections of the country to produce the President, thus giving rise to the idea of a rotational presidency as a negotiated approach. The article examined the rotational presidency, vis-à-vis its implication for inclusiveness, peace, the national question, and development in Nigeria. The study utilised historical materials, elite theory, and the consociational model of power sharing to explore how the political activities towards elections have shifted the attention of the populace away from the pedigree and the leadership potentials of the aspirants/candidates to their ethnic and religious backgrounds. The study suggests how good leaders can emerge without jettisoning inclusiveness.
This article traces a particular view of the classical agrarian question in Marxian political economy which has sustained the myth of industrialization as the basic objective of transformation. The ...idea was born in the late nineteenth century among the European vanguard, then consolidated as an axiom during the Cold War, only to be resurrected in the neoliberal period by a professionalized discipline of ‘agrarian studies’. This article argues that such a view fails to acknowledge the historic importance of the national question and its land and peasant components, which are irreducible to industrialization. The article restores national sovereignty to its proper place in the classical agrarian question and argues that it remains the cornerstone of all other dimensions of the agrarian question, including gender equity and ecological sustainability.
The article analyzes the subject of interethnic relations in the interpretation of the Russian citizen of Polish origin Marian Edmundovich Zdziechowski — linguist, theorist of Russian literature, ...religious thinker, philosopher, publicist, and public figure. Researchers from many Slavic countries turn to the study of the ideological heritage by Zdziechowski, since his sphere of research interests, as he claimed it himself, was centred at “the study of Slavs”. While we acknowledge the extensive work done in this field, we must admit that works by Zdziechowsk published in Russian periodicals of the pre-revolutionary period are still insufficiently introduced by modern scholars into their studies. That is the gap which this article seeks to fill. The article presents and analyzes the Zdziechowski’s opinions on the current system of interethnic relations in Imperial Russia and the cultural policy of that epoch regarding national minorities. is the authors show that, in presenting his views, Zdziechowski relied on the authoritative opinions on this issue of well-known Russian cultural figures of the time: Leo Tolstoy, B.N.Chicherin, G.N.Trubetskoy, A.N.Pypin, and V.D. Spasovich. Although Zdziechowski considered the problems of interethnic relations mainly at the example of the analysis of Russian state policy towards Poles living in the country, his views are regarded as important for understanding the nature of the imperial ethnic policy, in general. The editors of Moskovsky Ezhenedelnik, and Novoe Zveno, where his texts were published, give their appraisals of the activity of Zdziechowski. The evolution of the thinker’s views from the expressions of hope for a beneficial solution of the Polish question to the emergence of a sense of disappointment and pessimism is traced in the article. The coverage of this problem in the historical perspective reveals the ambiguity of its interpretations and solutions in the past and might help to improve the national policy in modern Russia.
Using material both from Sobukwe's well-known public addresses and from his lesser known private letters to his friend the liberal journalist Benjamin Pogrund, this article argues that Sobukwe is ...best regarded as a radical non-racialist who regarded race in anti-essentialist terms and sought to unmake the material, social and political conditions that give rise to it. It also explores the unmaking of race at the ordinary and everyday level.
José Carlos Mariátegui’s open engagement with Marxist theory and his adaptation of its ideas to his Latin American reality brought him into conflict with other leftists. At a continental conference ...of communist parties in Buenos Aires in 1929, he criticized the Comintern’s proposal to carve up the Americas into independent African-descent and Quechua and Aymara republics, arguing that conceptualizing the struggle in ethnic rather than class terms was a mistake. From documents preserved in the Comintern archives it appears that these comments had echoes in Moscow. Two newly translated Spanish-language documents on the “national question” challenge notions that Comintern officials were unaware of or ill-informed about developments in Latin America and are important to understanding their responses and challenges to his ideas on race and oppressed nationalities.
El compromiso abierto de José Carlos Mariátegui con la teoría marxista y su adaptación de estas ideas a la realidad latinoamericana lo pusieron en conflicto con otras y otros de la izquierda. En una conferencia continental de partidos comunistas en Buenos Aires en 1929, criticó la propuesta de la Internacional Comunista de dividir las Américas en repúblicas independientes afrodescendientes y quechuas y aymaras, argumentando que conceptualizar la lucha en términos étnicos en lugar de términos de clase era un error. Los documentos conservados en los archivos de la Internacional Comunista sugieren que estos comentarios hicieron eco en Moscú. Dos documentos en español recientemente traducidos en torno a la “cuestión nacional” desafían las nociones de que los funcionarios de la Internacional Comunista no estaban al tanto o estaban mal informados sobre los acontecimientos en América Latina, asunto que resultan importante para comprender sus respuestas y desafíos a las ideas de Mariátegui sobre raza y nacionalidades oprimidas.
PDF